Quotes from Richard Powers

People mean to drag her violently back into what people mistakenly call the world.

They form in front of him: his friend, his wife, his daughter. People who loved him, who believed he'd do good things. In the mild April mist, he thinks: All I ever wanted was to make one slight noise that might delight you all. How small a thought it took. How small a thought.

The game's best AIs are smarter than last year's interplanetary probes. Play becomes the engine of human growth. But

Adam doesn't get people. They say things to hide what they mean. They run after pointless trinkets.

for footprint and understanding.

It depends on a person's ability to say nevertheless, to do one small thing that seems beyond them, and, for a moment, break the grip of time.

It's a daring step, but in the world game, no daring is fatal. The only thing that will kill you is failing to leap.

Her own life had been a haze of privilege, narcissism, and impossibly extended adolescence, filled with mean, sardonic hipness and self-protection. Now she has been called.

From the first leaping figure in the strings, Els heard again the problem with music. Even the slightest tune sounded like a story. Melody played on the brain like a weather report, an avowal of faith, gossip, a manifesto. The tale came across, clearer than words. But there was no tale.

He'll build a career on that theme: cuing, priming, framing, confirmation bias, and the conflation of correlation with causality—all these faults, built into the brain of the most problematic of large mammals.

Nothing will be the same. The spruces answer: Nothing has ever been the same. We're all doomed, the man thinks. We have always all been doomed. But things are different this time. Yes. You're here.

To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power . . . ludicrous. And yet, from Plato to Pyongyang, that endless need to legislate sounds. To police the harmonic possibilities as if there were no limits to music's threat.

She looks like someone summoned to help the most wondrous products of four billion years of life.

Rage, the radical tip of a grief that time will never root out.

How life managed to add imagination to all the other tricks in its chemistry set is a mystery

He says there's nothing on Earth he can give to her, for their anniversary, to thank her for what she has given him. Nothing, except for a thing that grows.

Everything is so obvious, so blissfully clear. But her parents can't see it. There is great, joyous, and essential work to do. But first a person needs to graduate from endless self-love.

L'amore è un ciclo di feedback dal desiderio alla condivisione, alla perdita. Un moto anti-hebbiano: le attivazioni si fanno sempre più fiacche. (p.243)

Not everything we plant will take. Not every plant will thrive. But together we can watch the ones that do fill up our garden.

We'll meet you up there. When you come around.

legacy cognitive blindness will forever prevent people from acting in their own best interests.

The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: The problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can't escape.

La nostra vita a U. non somigliava affatto ai nostri ricordi. U. era cambiata in tutto, fuorché nei particolari. (p. 225)

the endless hostage swap of travelers east and west.